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From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.news.group
Subject: Re: CONCURRENT ad OR naivete', corruption and the net
Message-ID: <792@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 4-Dec-85 21:53:45 EST
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.792
Posted: Wed Dec  4 21:53:45 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Dec-85 04:25:11 EST
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
Lines: 97

[I am going way out on a limb here, please give me some consideration
 before feeling compelled to attack things, maybe personal mail first]

I have noticed a certain pattern in the arguments regarding this
CONCURRENT posting that has caused some flamage: I notice that
academic sites tend towards 'it was a commercial and inappropriate'
and commercial sites tend towards 'forgive the guy, he was a little
overzealous' (I am in both senses in the former group.) Maybe I am
imagining this.

Is there more to this than meets the eye? Are commercial sites lusting
after the opportunity to push their wares on USENET?

I have received calls from numerous companies asking me to trial their
product who have indicated that the reason they called me was that I
was 'visible' in the USENET technical groups.

Basically, I ignored the comment and treated it like any other product
I might have tried, I only tried it if I really might be a customer
(my time is far too valuable for anything else) and only mentioned it
if I felt truly compelled to do so by what I perceived were the interests
of people on the net (in fact, before you jump to any conclusions, try
to pull out any such thing I may have written, I think you'll find you
are only imagining there is an issue here with me personally, but who
else can start this very important discussion but one involved?)

If you are active on the net and think you would never do such a thing
but have gotten these nice offers to try some product, think again,
if you don't bring it up in conversation you probably never realized
why you were called (they are usually smart enough not to push the
point.) It's amazing what our egos can rationalize.

Is this backhanded advertising? Absolutely not as long as no advantage
(other than early viewing of the product) was taken (tho, of course,
what would happen if one of these vendor's called me back and said,
without reason, hey, keep the box, say after I stated that I was
impressed on some group?? Well, hasn't happened, so that's academic.
Also, so long as one feels free to praise or damn the product it is
ok (silence is always another choice, if I felt the product was lousy
I might just tell that to the vendor and forget it as I assume most
people don't want to hear about it anyhow unless it is likely a scam
they might fall for. About the only thing I damn a vendor for is not
knowing when to listen, well, pure incompetence also.)

Of course, who out there is being less scrupulous? How many 'innocent'
product reviews have you read in the technical groups? How many comments
about a product can really be distinguished??

What's the point Barry?

The point is: slowly and silently USENET may have grown to become one
of the most effective advertising mediums in the industry. People
*READ* it, a lot of it, not all the random groups, but it is clear
that decision makers out there are reading esp the technical groups,
they *BELIEVE* a lot of it (woe to them :-), they probably are telling
the vendors that "hmm, well I heard thus and such on net.unix-wizards..."
They hear that kind of comment. It is full of network personalities
who are incredibly talented and have incredible crediblity (ugh) because
their opinions are perceived as more or less untainted by anything
much more than some insane desire to say what they believe, and I believe
that to be true in most cases (people have biases, their work etc biases
them, but I think the sincerity is very high, especially in the technical
groups.)

This may factor in very strongly in this discussion of an ad like
CONCURRENT's, they are not the only one and I agree that all in all it
was not serious enough to damn them (I replied with a personal note
which was never answered however, wonder if that's what their lawyers
recommended, or just too swamped? or rude?)  And surely if we decide
to strengthen the ground rules it should only apply to new offenses.

What is going to happen when the dams burst (and they may) and
struggling, overzealous vendors just say the hell with it and post
what amounts to carefully worded ads (or is that what just
happened!)? Does it matter? Maybe, maybe not. Oh, we can cut off their
feeds maybe, bet you a dollar that never happens, not once, cuz no one
will agree that it was not 'just one offense' and harmful. Also, the
precedent will be resisted by the important commercial sites on the
net as we see happening here. The essential anarchy of the net makes
such rash actions highly unlikely. If it ever happened it *might* be
a vendor too stupid to couch their posting in a technical discussion,
repeated offenses (like weekly for months) and be unfortunate enough
to find their feed is a university that has no interest in them (that
in itself is interesting, when will we see the first lawsuit between
two attached vendors who decide it would be good strategy to cut the
other one off from the USENET? Sure, there's no contract, but that's
not all it takes given some hyperactive lawyers.)

Honestly, I don't want to single out CONCURRENT (well, I do a little)
but didn't we just go through this with some new chip set and
shareware. Do you think this is the last of it?

So, the question raised is:

		       Are we just being naive?

	-Barry Shein, Boston University